The Institute of Coaching was formerly the Coaching & Psychology Initiative founded by Coaching at Work editorial board member Carol Kauffman. It has five centres of excellence in education, research, applied positive psychology, healthcare and leadership coaching.
The research programme created by Mary Wayne Bush of the Foundation of Coaching has become the first building block of the new Institute. Harvard Medical School is also now home to the Foundation of Coaching.
Bush first conceived of a coaching research programme in 2005, recruiting a team of philanthropically-minded individuals immersed in coaching research worldwide to help her establish criteria and protocols for grant-making. She created mentoring matches for aspiring researchers around the globe and built a repository of research with Francine Campone. Soon what is thought to be the largest global grant-making programme had taken shape.
Bush has now stepped back, handing over to a team headed by Kauffman, along with Lew Stern, Susan David, and Margaret Moore. The Harnisch Fund for Coaching will continue the next generation of grants for coaching-related research and is designed to continue until at least 2015, with the intention of making $100,000 in coaching-related research grants each year.
The contract signed by Harnisch states that the Fund´s purpose will be to “generate empirically supported best practices for coaching, especially peer-reviewed research into the transformational aspects of coaching relationships and effective change strategies, then assure the widespread dissemination of those research findings to encourage the application of the coaching model of conversation in everyday life.”